In nearly a decade and a half of programming, White Bird has presented many memorable dance troupes, but few as distinctively striking as Australia's Chunky Move.

The Melbourne company made its North American debut in 2004 at Portland State University's Lincoln Hall with a piece called "Tense Dave," which critic Catherine Thomas called "a creepy psychodrama of a man trapped in existential and physical vertigo," set on a rotating stage with moving walls and doorways providing shifting glimpses of nightmare visions.

Five years later, with White Bird's PSU series temporarily displaced, the gymnasium in the downtown YWCA's 10th Avenue Athletic Club was the setting for "Two-Faced Bastard." That one split not just the action but also the audience in two, seating folks on opposite ends of the room, dividing the performance space in the center with a curtain of floor-to-ceiling vertical blinds, and playing devilishly with a fractured presentation that slipped back and forth from each opposing view.

This time, it's back to Lincoln Hall for "Connected," a collaboration between Gideon Obarzanek, Chunky Move's artistic director/choreographer, and Reuben Margolin, a Californian who makes remarkable kinetic sculptures. To judge by glimpses on video and photos, this could be the most arresting work we've seen yet from the company.

In the course of the hourlong work, a quintet of dancers assembles the string-and-paper pieces of Margolin's design into what the Sydney Morning Herald described as "a cross between a giant loom and a mobile. Its graceful presence takes the form of a wheel, strings that bisect the height of the stage on the diagonal, and a fleet of birdlike shapes that soar and wheel as a flock. So seductive is it to look at that you might add it to children and animals as a scene-stealing danger to performers."

The dancers' intricate movements create, complement and manipulate the sculpture, which (apparently with the aid of magnets and an overhead frame) performs its own sine-wave-like undulations.

"I guess in a broader sense, I would say the work is about connectivity and attachment," dancer Stephanie Lake told Trespass Magazine. "And I guess not only the physical representation of that but an emotional representation of that also."